Cal EvansApril 18, 2011April 18, 2011Comments Off on A few podcast goodies to kick your week off right

I love podcasts. I listen to them in most of my spare time. Walking the dog, cutting the grass or just cooling my heels waiting on the next great thing that is happening, i can usually be found with ear-bud inserted and MP3 player handy, ready to use the time constructively. Recently, I’ve listened to a couple of good episodes of my favorites ‘casts. Click on in, I’ll share with you so you can enjoy them as well.

Mike Pavlak is a Solutions Consultant and IBM i Series expert. In this podcast Mike talks a little bit about where he's come from, the history of PHP on the i and, what I think is most interesting, what it is that PHP developers can learn from the "old-school" RPG developers and vice versa. Remember the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"? While programmers have a tendency to look forward to the brightness of the future there is a lot that can be learned by looking back at where we came from. And, surprise, it turns out that there's a lot we can learn from each other.

Zend Framework has grown tremendously since the first public preview release in March 2006. Originally a slim, MVC framework with a number of standalone components, it has grown to a codebase more than 2M lines of code. Work now turns to version 2, with goals of increased simplicity and advanced PHP 5.3 usage.

There has been a lot of talk over the past several years about the difference between performance and scalability. When talking about building a scalable application queuing is a concept that many PHP developers are not overly familiar with. In this talk we will demonstrate how you can use the Zend Server Job Queue to scale your application.

The object-relational impedance mismatch makes persisting PHP objects in a relational database a daunting task. How about these new schemaless NoSQL databases? We will have a look at the problems involved with persisting PHP objects, and introduce design patterns that help solving these problems. Putting the patterns to good use, we will build a working PHP object persistence solution for MongoDB.

This session introduced one of the less-known design patterns in the PHP world, but also one that can greatly improve the decoupling and the testability of your code: Dependency Injection. I will demonstrate how to use Dependency Injection in your projects, and I will take advantage of the PHP 5.3 new features to create a fully-featured DI container live.

PHP Abstract has a new episode! This time I’m talking with Paul Tomlinson about Torpor, a new ORM persistence abstraction layer for PHP. He talks about the reasons behind making this new layer, and how it’s features compare to other similar solutions.

And PHP Abstract is on a role. 3 weeks in a row! In this episode I chat (in a noisy bar) with Travis Swicegood about Git. He gives a number of compelling reasons as he tries to sway everyone away from CVS and SVN.